LITTLE CAESAR

In the Chicago of the 1920s, two Italian-American gangsters, Cesare ‘Rico’ Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) and Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), are busy with modest criminal enterprises, trying to get ahead. Bandello, a.k.a. ‘Little Caesar’, is a tough guy determined to make his way at any cost, while Joe dreams of removing himself from the business and becoming a famous dancer. Once they join Sam Vettori’s gang, Rico soon becomes its undisputed leader. Joe, meanwhile, is unable to escape Rico’s domination of him, but he gets his wish and performs with a famous dancer, Olga Strassoff. It is she who convinces Joe to denounce Rico, who has fallen from grace and been replaced by his rival ‘Big Boy’, to the police. Rico, hunted by the police, is forced to flee while his gang breaks up and ‘Little Caesar’, after ending up in a public dormitory, in an extreme attempt to make a comeback ends up riddled with bullets from the police who are hunting him down. LeRoy’s film, together with Hawks’ Scarface and Wellman’s Public Enemy, constitutes the classic trilogy of the gangster movie, with the rise and fall of ‘one of the first true anti-heroes of American cinema, dark, dangerous and lonely’, masterfully played by Edward G. Robinson.